The present invention relates to a document scanning system.
A flat bed scanner includes a platter onto which a document can be placed or automatically fed. Scanner software is known which enables a user to specify a rectangular area of the platter, or all of the platter, to be scanned and scanning characteristics, for example, resolution, colour depth, brightness, contrast to be employed for the scan.
Documents such as identity papers, driving licenses, passports etc. may include images such as a photograph, several fingerprints, a bar code, a signature or even text blocks. Many organizations or governments are currently trying to build up databases of such information in a computer readable form, and in order to do this the documents need to be scanned. A set of such documents associated with a person could contain several different images which require a different set of scanning characteristics. For example, a photograph may need to be scanned at a colour resolution of 300 dpi and a 24-bit colour depth, whereas a bar code could be scanned at 70 dpi in monochrome with a high contrast and a fingerprint may need to be scanned at 150 dpi in 8-bit grey scale.
A scanner can take several seconds to complete a scan, depending on the area to be scanned and the scanning characteristics. If done manually, setting the characteristics for a scan could take several seconds. If each document in a set or each image in a document were to be scanned separately with its own scanning characteristics, then the process of acquiring information would take too long. Alternatively, if a complete document or document set were scanned once at the maximum required resolution and colour depth of any image in the document set, disk storage space required for the scanned image would be prohibitive and still characteristics such as brightness and contrast could be less than optimal for individual images within the document.
According to the present invention there is provided a document scanning system adapted to communicate with a scanner to provide scanning characteristics and scanning coordinates for a scan and to receive a scanned image from said scanner, said document scanning system being adapted to process scanning requests defining a set of images to be scanned and to calculate said scanning characteristics and scanning coordinates from a document set definition comprising one or more image definitions, each image definition including an associated set of coordinates and scanning characteristics for the or each image.
The invention enables a document set, comprising one or more documents, to be placed on a scanner platter and to be scanned in one pass of the scanner across the platter. The single scanned image can then be processed into several images, each of which may then be manipulated into a required resolution and colour depth. The invention thus saves a) storage space, by only storing the required images at their required resolution and colour depth, and b) time, by eliminating many repetitive scans for each image required.